It has been noted, but little discussed, that when Milton sat down in 1630 to write what would become his first publication (a sixteen-line epitaph for Shakespeare in heroic couplets that appeared in the 1632 Shakespeare Folio), he chose to end his poem with a figure that not only described poetic inspiration as a reproductive process, but as a dangerous one. The figure, as we shall see, suggests that the inspiring power of Shakespeare's verse is so great that it not only impregnates the imaginations of his readers, but also causes the deaths of their imaginations, making them give birth – in the Platonic sense – to so many progeny, to so many fancies, that “fancy” itself ultimately dies in the process. The epitaph was only the sixth poem Milton had attempted in English since he had begun writing vernacular poetry about five years earlier, and was only the fifth that he had completed. The others were “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough,” written some time in 1628, Sonnet I, “Song: On May Morning,” “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,” and “The Passion”. As many critics have noted over the years, all of these poems, as well as a fair number of the Latin poems Milton had also written by this time, are full of self-conscious expressions of worry over just what sort of poetic identity it would be best for the young poet to establish.